Patrick lost more than 120 pounds over the course of a year using slowcarb diet, and 2 cheat days per week.

4 First Princples

The Minimum Effective Dose:

Treat exercise and diet as a drug: use exactly the dose needed to get the quantified results.

Sample meds:

20 minutes of kettlebells swings, 3 times per week

30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up

1:30pm on the clitoris

90-120 seconds of tension for most muscles

focus on time under tension

1 set to failure

5 seconds to raise, 5 seconds to lower (removes momentum).

1,200 words for conversational fluency

usually identified my ministry of education

takes 8 to 12 weeks

The Extremes Inform the Mean, not Vice-Versa

Design firm working on garden shears: didn’t want to know about the mean user. They wanted to know about the extremes: the parapalegic who was gardening. the elderly user. If they could design for the extreme, the middle will be taken care of.

Know Thy Worst-Case Scenario: ET, Staph, Emodin, and friends.

Prepare for worst-case scenario if you are going to do self-experimentation.

A simple injection ended up as a staph infection in Tim’s elbow which required hospitalization and intraveneous antibiotics.

Tracking + Loss Aversion > How To

The best protocol doesn’t matter if you abandon it.

The Rules of Behavior Change

Make it conscious (“flash diet” and before pics)

People who use food diaries lose 3x as much weight as people who don’t

People who take picture of food lose even more.

If you divided group into two and one half got a personal trainer, and one half used iPhone to take pictures, the iPhone group would lose more weight

Make it a game (Drucker and five sessions)

People who do something 5 times will keep doing it.

Rig the first 5 sessions so you’ll keep doing: go to gym for 15 minutes, not 3 hours.

Make it competitive (embrace loss aversion)

Make it small and temporary (MED, two weeks)

two weeks is something people can do

otherwise, people will take any lapse as an excuse to give up

Keep Improvement Relative

It’s not about beating everyone else.

It’s about making the biggest possible gains relative to yourself.

Questions

Q: What about the impact of eating meats?

A: Ethically raised meats are possible. It’s possible to be lacto-ovo vegetarian and get enough fatty acids, but to be totally vegan seems to cause issues, reproductive and otherwise.

Q: What about these high achievers, type A personalities, how do they approach fitness?

A: They are tinkerers, experimenters. They track things. They may not have a complex system, but they have a pad of paper, and they keep track of it.

Q: What if we’re already doing yoga, and working out, and doing stuff beyond the MED. Are we hurting ourselves?

A: I view exercising as something to have a minumum effective dose, and seperate out recreation: going for hike, doing something for fun.

Also, sitting down does far more damage than doing some exercise or recreation.

If you don’t have a competitive goal, then go nuts. If you are training for a marathon, than stick with the MED.

Q: For language acquisition, verb conjugation is very hard. What to do?

A: Vised.com: They do flashcards.

Japanese: common characters, 1300 characters.

Learn I want, I need, I like. If you tag these verbs with other verbs, you vastly expand your repitoire.

gruneberg: imagery for vocabulary. you can learn almost 400 words a day.

Q: From your new book, what could you apply back to the 4 Hour Work Week?

A: Richard Branson was asked what thing to do to be more productive, and he said “work out”

There is a lot to provide that exercise has a big positive impact on learning, cognitive ability, and productivity.

Using exercise/recreation to bracket your day: before and after.

Q: How to sleep less?

Experiment how to increase REM sleep.

Two tablespoons of almond butter, ensures you don’t have low body sugar.

Polyphasic sleep: one 4 hour block, plus 20 minute naps.

Uberman Sleep: Just 20 minutes. You’ll be completely asocial. If you miss one of those naps, you are f’ed.

Before trying to cut down on sleep, do an 80/20 analysis, and product analysis.

Q: Any plans for a workbook that puts all this together – what’s anecdotal versus experimental vs. broadly applicable.

A: Want to use sites that allow people to track health to compile data. Working on it.

Q: How do we take principles from the 4 Hour Body, and get people who are older, who are in midwest lifestyle, and get them to adopt it?

A: It’s hard to fight with logic. Point to social studies: point to Tracey, and what she accomplished. Ask them to make one small change for 2 weeks.

Q: I am allergic to both eggs and most beans. What can I do?

A: Allergy tests are notoriously error prone. I have a friend who had an expensive allergy tests, and tests came back that he was allergic to 15 items. Have the tests done again before you make massive lifestyle changes.

Same test, same labs, different results.

You don’t need eggs.

You can also create food allergies by eating the same foods over and over again for a long time. If you cycle off for 2 months.

Very lactose intolerent if he drinks pasturized/homogonized milk, and just fine if he drinks raw milk.

if you don’t eat the beans, track the calories to make sure you are eating enough.

Q: Diagnosed with irregular heatbeat. Doctor said “you are stuck with this for life”.

A: Some fantastic doctors out there. But… C=MD. As long as you pass your tests, you get an MD. There is always someone who is the worst in their class.

The average healthcare visit is 11 minutes. Many times a doctor doesn’t or can’t spend the time to work with you.

Get a second opinion.

Not always the doctor’s fault: they don’t have the resources or reimbursement to do it.

Spend the money to see a good specialist.

Get a second opinion.

Try removing gluten from your diet, and see if that has any effect. Removing gluten gets rid of many issues.